Note that this release removes the “Hide placeholders of blocked elements” option from the user interface. The underlying functionality is still available via a hidden preference, as explained in the original announcement.

Ever since the Firefox nightly builds switched on E10S (multi-process) the Adblock Plus first-run page was broken. We noticed the issue mid-December last year and were working on a solution since then. The result was a completely different backend for the first-run page, one that will hopefully be used for the other pieces of the user interface as well soon (no urgency there however). The new first-run page in Adblock Plus 2.6.6.3884 for Firefox and Adblock Plus 1.8.9.1299 for Chrome, Opera and Safari should hopefully look and behave exactly the same as the old one. It should however be functional in the current Firefox nightlies with E10S switched on and perform better in Safari.

If you want to test the first-run page without reinstalling, you can copy chrome://adblockplus/content/ui/firstRun.html into the address bar in Firefox or chrome-extension://ldcecbkkoecffmfljeihcmifjjdoepkn/firstRun.html in Chrome and Opera.

Disabling the “Hide placeholders of blocked elements” option in the menu (Firefox) or in the “General” section of the options page (Chrome, Opera, Safari) had the effect that placeholders were shown for elements which didn’t load because of Adblock Plus. The purpose of this feature was to see when something was blocked on a webpage. However, the results couldn’t be relied on because it didn’t have any effect on hidden or generally invisible elements. Also, in Chrome, Opera and Safari there is now the icon badge indicating the number of blocked requests (coming to Firefox as well soon). Therefore, we decided to remove the option from the user interface.

There is only one change, Adblock Plus will use a slightly different approach to read files from disk (issue 1510). The reason is a change that Mozilla made for Firefox and that broke Adblock Plus completely in the Firefox nightly builds.

The current Adblock Plus 2.6.5.3872 for Firefox development build is a release candidate, we plan to release Adblock Plus 2.6.6 next Tuesday (November 11, 2014). There is only one change, Adblock Plus will use a slightly different approach to read files from disk (issue 1510). The reason is a change that Mozilla made for Firefox and that broke Adblock Plus completely in the Firefox nightly builds — this change was temporarily reverted but it will land again.

We don’t expect any issues with this development build. However, please let us know if Adblock Plus suddenly has trouble reading its data (everything empty in Filter Preferences). Also, there is a slight chance of startup performance regressions here.

The development of the Adblock Plus logo and icon has over eight years of history. You can find the first Adblock Plus specific logo suggestions here, or some newer ones here. Eight years later, in year 2014, we still have very similar problems as in those days. Since it is also tradition to do this development together with our community, we are excited to do it again to improve the Adblock Plus icon and logo.

I want to separate the community discussion into an icon and a logo discussion, since early discussions have shown it to be two different topics

ProPublica recently wrote about canvas fingerprinting which supposedly has even more significant privacy implications than cookies. And the worst of it: unlike cookies, canvas fingerprinting cannot be blocked by Adblock Plus!

Those of you who know Adblock Plus are probably saying now: “What, Adblock Plus can block cookies? I never knew that!” And you are right of course — Adblock Plus doesn’t block cookies. So, what is this canvas fingerprinting and what does it have to do with Adblock Plus?